Flashback Chapter

“You’re leaving me? Again?” Lucy paused packing and gripped her late brother’s shirt, her movements mechanical and fluid until her uncle decided to shatter her day with even more grief.

“Lucy, don’t look at it as me leaving again, it’s-” Alfred couldn’t bear to look into Lucy’s pain stricken face. His niece was far too young, far too faithful, to be sorting through her family’s belongings to peddle for extra money. “It’s just another temporary separation.”

“A temporary separation!” Her curls bounced about her shoulders as she shook her head. “What, are you taking lessons from the preachers now? They spewed the same shit yesterday, not that you would know.”

Alfred tried his best to ignore her jab at his absence from the funeral, but the irritated ripple traveling across his eyebrow betrayed him. How was he at fault for a late train?

“Why did you even show up here today, anyway?” Lucy’s voice cracked and her hands trembled. She rose from the worn wooden floor, her head down as the first tear of the day fell onto her uncle’s shoe.

Haven’t you already done enough? She wanted more than anything to scream - scream at her uncle’s audacity to resurface in her home after over a year of no letters, nothing hinting at any progress in Chicago.

“I can’t just let you stay here with no family.” Alfred dug his hands in his pockets. “And thank God I did come back, I’ve heard everything about Mister Strike from the neighbors.”

Their tyrannical landlord was always in the market for a new woman after his last was used up to his liking. Lucy was a challenging line to cross off his list, but as the debt piled with no nouveau riche uncle to be seen, his perverted prospects grew by the day.

“Don’t you dare use that to your advantage!” Lucy snapped. “It’s none of your business.”

“So you’re telling me you’d rather go with some backwoods creep who’s over 30 years older than you than come with me!?” Alfred bit back.

Alfred couldn’t stomach the thought of his niece, his brother’s only daughter, plummeting to such a desperate measure instead of going with him.

“I’m telling you that I don’t want to up and leave to some shady city with a traitor!” Lucy yelled, throwing her brother’s shirt and raggedy teddy bear to the ground.

Alfred was speechless.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Traitor.

“So that’s it then?” After what passed like hours, finally he was able to stutter out a response. “You’re just going to whore yourself out to some dirty old man to keep this house? That’s the last thing your parents would have wanted for you!”

“Who said I was going to sleep with him!?” Lucy cried. “There’s other ways for me to stay here, I can-”

Alfred waited for an answer he knew would never come.

“Selling off their things isn’t enough to pay for this place, Luce.” He shook his head, blinking back his own tears as his eyes flew across the barren parlor. “If you’ve sold off all of what was in here already and there’s still not enough-”

“There would be enough if you had never left us!” Lucy yelled again, gripping her uncle’s sleeve just like the little girl he had adored so long ago. “Why!? Was it worth it!? To leave me like this-”

“Lucy-” Alfred caught her before her knees hit the floor. “I never wanted it to turn out like this.”

What he said was the truth. He had big plans for his father’s leftover money. He told all of them that he would go to Chicago, make something of himself, something of them. But what did that matter now, especially to Lucy?

“You know I would have never left if I knew this was going to happen.” His breath caught in his throat, and once more he tried to retrieve her senses from the pits of grief. “Please, for you and for your father, come with me to Chicago.”

“You still don’t understand!” Lucy continued to weep. “Don’t you remember what Grandpa said?”

“Luce-” Alfred let out a long sigh of exasperation.

“I don’t even know why I asked you that question. You’ve clearly forgotten, but not me.” Lucy looked up at her uncle with eyes that would have sent anyone else running for the door. “‘Even if we don’t own the house in name, we own it in our hearts.’”

She pushed away from her uncle’s embrace. “But I guess it makes sense you can’t understand. You never had a heart in the first place.”

Lucy knew that she had struck a low blow, but what was she to do? In her state of distress any slew of curses could have tumbled from her mouth, and before she said something she would truly regret, she headed for the door.

Slam.

Alfred was numb. He had expected Lucy to greet him with a cold shoulder, but her tears and her disappointment were enough to make him join his brother in an early grave.

“God,” He croaked. “What the hell do you want from me?” With no answer to be heard, Alfred followed Lucy’s lead and fell to the floor. His nephew’s toys, his brother’s hunting shoes - every splatter of clutter sliced another cut to his heart.

He picked up the one photo they had all taken together, a memory tucked away in a gilded frame, so distant it could have been mistaken for a fantasy. The young man on the left swaddled a little boy not more than a year old in one arm with another hand resting proudly on a messy-haired, freckle-faced girl’s shoulder. Beside him stood a homely young woman, his wife and childhood sweetheart, followed by his father and-

Alfred could only look for a second before a nauseous dread swept over him.

His brother.

Him.

Alfred.

The traitor, the prodigal son that failed to be.

Alfred’s hands started to shake. His mind wandered to the young girl in the photo, his brother’s only living child, hoping that wherever she ran off to moments ago provided her more comfort than he could ever give.